Over since he was a teenager, Lexington native Ryan Hairgrove has been interested in fine woodworking and furniture design. This year, however, marked the beginning of Ruggedwoods – Hairgrove’s wood turning business.

Since graduating college in 1999 with a degree in engineering and drawing from Davidson County Community College and degrees in fine woodworking and furniture design and manufacturing from Rockingham County Community College, Hairgrove, 41, has done wood turning contract work for multiple companies.

“I just started [Ruggedwoods] actually this year because I do so much contract work through a couple companies that have showrooms in High Point, Atlanta, New York and Las Vegas,” Hairgrove said. “I make some of their displays and prototypes for them. So, I’ve done a lot of that contract work and now I’m just getting into more of the art stuff. I’ve sold stuff at different galleries throughout North Carolina.”

“I’ve made thousands of different pieces,” Hairgrove said. “It’s just whatever the customer wants. I don’t do kitchen cabinets and stuff like that, but I do custom furniture. If somebody wants something built, we can meet and come up with a design.”

Hairgrove first became interested in woodworking in high school.

“Well, basically it was just a home hobby messing around my house,” Hairgrove said. “My dad had a small lathe when I was a teenager and I just started messing with it then.”

When he is not working at his job at a rubber manufacturing facility in High Point, Hairgrove spends his time wood turning during the evenings and weekends.

According to Hairgrove, the wood turning process is long and extensive.

“Everything starts off as a green wood, like a freshly cut tree or log, and I rough turn it to whatever the maximum size that the piece will yield, as big as I can make it given the piece of wood, and I’ll rough turn it down to an inch or an inch and a half thick and then dry it slowly over a year or two,” Hairgrove said. “And then I can go back once the wood is dry. I go back and finish turning it, and then I’m able to sand it. You just really can’t sand green wood to a good finish. The wood has to be dry before it’ll sand, and that’ll take a good coat of oil.”

Hairgrove said he does not begin a piece with a pre-conceived notion of what it will be.

“Once you start turning the wood, it’ll kind of tell you what it’s going to be,” Hairgrove said. “There will be natural defects in the wood or things you have to avoid or you want to include in there. So each one of them is totally different. There’s not a set pattern I go by.”

All of the wood Hairgrove uses is locally harvested and repurposed, mostly from Davidson County and Forsyth County. Hairgrove said he gets a large amount of wood from his father’s saw mill, Hairgrove Diversified Services, which sells natural edge slabs, custom lumber and rough sawn lumber.

“It’s all out of what would be reclaimed wood or figured wood,” Hairgrove said. “I do not go cut down trees just to make turnings out of them. It’s all leftovers from my dad’s saw mill, and we have tree companies that bring us trees and some of those I turn. The stuff would have ended up as firewood or just laying on the ground rotting.”

Moving forward, Hairgrove plans to complete some work for Goose and the Monkey Brew House, which is to be located in Lexington’s Depot District and set to open in spring of 2018.

“I’m getting ready to do some stuff for them such as tables and implementing some old steel and iron fixtures that were in the building that they’re renovating,” Hairgrove said. “It’s going to be a mixed media thing with metal and wood.”

Hairgrove’s work can be viewed on ruggedwoods.net and on Facebook and Instagram at ruggedwoods. Hairgrove can be contacted at ruggedwoods@gmail.com.